Dr. Luther spoke in this vein at Mount Vernon Wednesday evening, at the 67th anniversary of the Wartburg Orphans’ Farm School.
He denied that there had been any atrocities. His mere statement of course immediately reduces to dust the murders, the suicides, the bloodlettings, and all the other less obvious forms of persecution to which solid pages in The New York Times, The New York Evening Post, The Manchester Guardian, the despatches of Dorothy Thompson, reams of authenticated documents and letters have testified.
Jews, he said, were inclined to movements of a Communist nature; the implication therefore is, in the words of Edgar Answel Mowrer’s summation of Hitler anti-Semitism, “Perish the Jew”. Even if you assume that Jews are Communists how does that justify persecution of the Jews? But Jews, as Jews, are no more Communists than are Germans, as Germans. What would the program of the National Socialists be without its pro-Communist, anti-Capitalist clauses? Now as for the Jews being more Communistically inclined than the non-Jews, let us consider these simple figures: There are 600,000 Jews in Germany; in the last election between five and six millions of votes were cast for the Communists. Even if every Jew in Germany, man, woman and child, had voted for Communism—and the mere statement points the absurdity—they would have cast only one-tenth of the total Communist vote. The Jewish population in Germany is middle-class, and not Communist. The possibility is that the Jews cast only one percent of the total Communist vote in Germany, or even less, and one percent is the ratio of Jewish population to the entire population of the Reich.
But the most Lutherish kind of exaggeration was expressed when he said that nearly fifty percent of the government officials have been Jews. That just hasn’t been so. The Jew in Germany, under the most propitious of circumstances, has never had the opportunity of his English-Jewish colleague. In the seventeen cabinets of Germany since the war, containing a total of 200 members, there were six Jews, and of these four had been baptized. And certainly in the provincial governments there has been nothing more rare than a Jew in office.
Is Dr. Luther merely careless?
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
